


Reticence

by bbcsherlockian



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, POV Sherlock Holmes, Post-The Sign of Three, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-29
Updated: 2014-06-29
Packaged: 2018-02-06 18:52:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1868583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bbcsherlockian/pseuds/bbcsherlockian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My pulse is its own testimony, and with it I prove myself wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reticence

Listen. 

A beat of silence to hear the beat of my heart, listen - yes, you can hear the second hand of the clock and the muffled noise of London’s traffic which only becomes prominent in the night when whispers draw closer and the glow of the television seems more comforting, but for now just--

Hear me. Can you hear it? 

I don’t think you can. I close my eyes and imagine your fingers working slowly, methodically, sliding awkwardly into place across twenty six letters and the tapping sound muffles the sound of my heart slightly. It’s a more assuaging noise.

I am absolute and real and completely authentic. Humour me. Listen to the sound of my oh-so-insubstantiate heart and know that you were wrong, that I was wrong to convince you of such a tragedy. A man with no heart? A man who can’t love? I am a liar to myself, and to you. Everyone else can go and hang. 

But now-- I will the cacophony higher, urging it forward to a crescendo which is impossible to reach and the clock and the traffic and all the world ceases to exist beyond the planet of my hearing and all I can listen to is the sound of my own blood. It's alright now, you can listen too; I have nothing left to lose. In my head now, with my eyes pressed so tightly shut it’s as if I’m throttling them, your hands still and you turn your head to notice the pulse in my neck despite the cursor blinking extraneously away at you just behind the screen.

Your attention - your entire attention - is fixed upon me, a small pinprick of darkness who willed himself into blossoming existence for your eyes.

But then my eyelids flutter open (perhaps it’s intentional, perhaps I wanted to draw myself away before I destroyed myself, perhaps I wanted to only stop when I were ashes) and I see your chair, the cushions plump and plush just the way you would insist on them being, and only for a second it’s like you’ve just got up to boil the kettle or to have a shower or to get pad thai from around the corner. But of course, the takeaway place shut down months ago and I didn’t have much use for the kettle, solitarily. 

It’s like all the forests have shed their damp foliage in the base of my throat all at once and before I can take another breath the leaves die and crumple and dry amber and red fills my lungs because, you see, your chair is so sorely and achingly empty so abruptly that it’s as though my heart has forgotten how to beat at all.

I can’t complain, can’t protest. You married her. You chose her. You’re drawn to the perilous and she’s dangerous all right, far more dangerous than myself. If you had chosen me nothing would have been the same and I would have postulated wildly and said some insignificant words which could never truly portray what my chest knows with conviction before letting you listen to the beat of my everything. And then, if you still hadn’t believed me, I would have pulled apart my ribs one by one and you would say “that must hurt” and you would say “stop it now, you’ve proved your point” and then, finally, once all the sinews had separated and I would be seeping blood into the hardwood floor of our living room, you would say “oh, so you do have a heart” and then I would show you quite plainly that it was full of absolutely nothing other than you. I would keep showing you until the day I died, and then a bit longer after that.

She wouldn’t do that for you. She won’t. You’re living in the belly of her beast when you could be living in the mouth of one. 

But, oh-- Imagine an ocean of armchairs, pointing away from the moon. And with their backs to the light the water would claim them one by one - or all at once, it’s inconsequential - and as they were drowning no one was watching because they had been without inhabitants for so long that they had forgotten to mourn their own losses, so no one even attempted to care.

You, me: we’re all just empty chairs getting swallowed up by an even emptier sea, floating to the bottom and feeling the cold sand at our feet. We’ve forgotten what the tide feels like, lapping against our skin.

I pick confetti out of my hair and close my eyes and - for only a second - framed by the accent of my heart and the remedying percussion of your fingers, for only a second I can pretend that it’s ours.


End file.
